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In these difficult economic times, there is a tempting tendency to pare any waste in all operations. This paring can be especially detrimental to new-product development, because what appears as waste in operations such as manufacturing can be essential to the development to new products that customers want. This workshop will not take a spendthrift approach to product development, but it will emphasize what is truly different about it so that managers can invest their new-product resources for maximum benefit. We will do this by looking carefully at development environments facing the increasingly common situation of frequent midproject change.
Global competitors, disruptive business models, emerging technologies, and increasingly empowered customers (in part due to the Internet) are causing more midstream change in product development projects. Time to market is still important, but the time that counts most today is the interval from when you make the last change due to what you learn about customers, your markets, and your chosen technology until you can deliver the resulting product.
Traditional product development and project management techniques presume stability. In contrast, this workshop assumes that change will happen when it is most unwelcome, and it thus presents practical tools and approaches for dealing with change effectively.
· When were you last able to complete development project without making significant changes?
· Were these changes disruptive?
· What did you do to anticipate or prepare for these changes?
· Would you like to be prepared for change better next time?
· Would you actually like to lead the change (that is, the innovation) in your industry?
Management Challenge
Traditional management techniques for product development follow a plan-your-work, work-your-plan approach. For instance, so-called best practice for producing a product that customers want is to do market research—called voice of the customer—refine the findings into a written set of product requirements, and design the product to the documented requirements. However, the research of Don Reinertsen, author of Managing the Design Factory and the forthcoming The Principles of Product Development Flow, shows that this never happens: there is always a change in the product requirements before the design can be completed. Worse, he found that only 5 percent of designers even have complete requirements when they start designing!
We conduct most development projects using techniques of the project management profession. These techniques were developed originally for relatively stable construction projects, not for likely-to-change projects featuring product innovation. Then we reward the project manager for executing the project plan to the letter, not for leading change.
In short, innovation is all about change, but the tools we try to apply to it were intended for stable environments.
About This Workshop
In this workshop, we turn things around. Rather than planning on no changes and being caught off guard when they happen, we assume a chaotic world and thus expect change. Our inspiration comes from the field of agile development that has arisen in the software development world during the past decade to deal effectively with constantly changing requirements as developers better understand the customer and the technology being used as development proceeds. Unfortunately, agile software development techniques depend on some unique characteristics of software, such as object technologies and automated testing. Consequently, we use agile development only for inspiration and proceed to build a set of tools from the ground up specifically for developing non-software products.
Practical Focus
Every project is different, so the workshop presents a kit of tools that can be adapted to the needs of each project. The tools include customers and product requirements in a changing environment, iteration and experimentation to explore and test change, modular product architectures to isolate change, and a technique from Toyota, called set-based design, to keep design options open. Strong teams are at the core of effective development, so we'll show how to adapt the proven technique of co-location to the global workplace. Decisions—thousands of them—are at the core of development, so we consider how to make them so as to keep options open, often by making them at the last responsible moment. Finally, we wrap up with more flexible ways of handling project management, product development processes, and organizational change.
Who Should Attend
Management at all levels will benefit from this fresh outlook. This includes R&D management and managers from supporting functions, such as finance, quality, regulatory, procurement, marketing, and operations. It might appear that fast-moving high-tech industries would benefit most, but today any industry can be stymied by change imposed on it by the marketplace or by changing technological norms. So this workshop is for management of any company that desires to be a market leader in a chaotic world.
About the Instructor: Preston Smith has been working with manufacturing companies to improve their product development for 25 years as a consultant and trainer. He has given over 100 workshops on leading product development techniques in 26 countries. Preston’s early work centered on time to market, and he coauthored the seminal book in the field, Developing Products in Half the Time. More recently, he has rebuilt agile software development techniques as tool kit of flexibility techniques for non-software projects, resulting in the book, Flexible Product Development. Prior to his consulting career, Preston spent 20 years in engineering and engineering management. He is a Certified Management Consultant and holds a PhD in engineering from Stanford University.
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